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Info: Ghyslain Raza (born circa 1988) from Trois-Rivières, Quebec (Canada) at the age of 15 became known throughout the Internet in late April 2003 and May 2003 as the "Star Wars Kid."
On November 8, 2002 Raza had made a video of himself acting like the Star Wars character Darth Maul, using a golf ball retriever to represent his lightsaber. It was filmed at the studio of his high school. On April 19, 2003, one of his classmates stumbled upon the tape and uploaded it to the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network as a prank.
The video file spread across the Internet extremely rapidly; within only weeks it had been downloaded millions of times. Within days, artists all over the world began making modifications to the original video, such as adding music, visual effects and sounds, combining it with other well-known videos or scenes from films, etc., for comical effect. Among the many renditions is a Matrix video, with Ghyslain as Neo.
Raza reportedly suffered considerable embarrassment, in part because the video showed him to be somewhat overweight and not particularly athletic or graceful. The case raised important privacy issues and was extensively reported in mainstream news media worldwide, including the New York Times and CBS News and BBC News.
In July 2003, his family filed a CDN$250,000 lawsuit against the families of the schoolmates - Michaël Caron, François Labarre, Jérôme Laflamme, and Jean-Michel Rheault - who allegedly took the video and put it on the Internet without Raza's consent, claiming that Raza had suffered harassment and derision both from his schoolmates and from the general public because of the video. The lawsuit stated that he had dropped out of school and had finished his school year at the Pavillon Arc-en-ciel child psychiatry ward at the Trois-Rivières Regional Hospital Centre, and quoted Internet chat transcripts between the four defendants as demonstrating lack of remorse.
An internet petition to get Raza a cameo role in Star Wars Episode III received more than 140,000 "signatures." However, although George Lucas sympathized with the young man's plight, the film contains no such cameo and there were never any plans to do so, nor is it at all clear that Raza himself would have wished it.
Most recently, the original few websites that hosted the video began internet fund-raisers to buy Ghyslain an iPod and an iBook. Thanks to a large USD$500 donation from an anonymous benefactor, Ghyslain has since received his iPod, but has yet to receive an iBook.
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